You'd think she was a thespian

Dick Cheney’s sister may not be a thespian, but his lesbian daughter’s personal life has extremists of all stripes riled up again.

Some woman I’ve never heard of from some ostensibly “conservative” women’s group I’ve never heard took advantage of the Cheney families good news to get her 15-minutes making herself available to the press:

She has not only injured her child, she has destroyed the work her father has done. She has acted in a way that denies everything that the Bush administration has worked for. She’s essentially saying: “In your face.”

I disagree. She’s essentially saying, “Mom, Dad, you’re gonna be grandparents again.” She might be saying, “In your face, sis. Lesbians can still get pregnant,” to her straight sister. But I doubt it…

A fill-in at Focus on the Family opined that “Love can’t replace a mom or dad.” Apparently Dr. Dobson was too busy filming worse than worthless psychobabble, feel-good news segment filler about raising children to make a statement himself. I don’t think Mary Cheney ever suggested love could replace a mom or dad. I also doubt that this child is going to lack strong male rolemodels, with a Dark Lord of the Sith for a Grandpa.

In any case, she has conceived. What would these good folks have her do? Get an abortion? I hate to quote Scripture too often or folks might get the wrong idea, but again from the Gospel According to Matthew [and again with the usual meaning for the red letters] – Matthew 23:23:

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have left undone the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faith. But you ought to have done these, and not to have left the other undone.

There is surely coming a point at which the sheer dissonance between what the GOP base believes and the way even the most conservative vice-president in modern times deals with the reality of his own family must surely prompt some kind of Republican adjustment.

Yeah, okay. Except that Dick Cheney is conservative in the Western mold of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, where getting the government off people’s backs was a lot more important than making sure that women covered their head and didn’t speak in church. The idea that Dick Cheney is some sort of American Taliban is and always has been way off base. Dick Cheney’s a Methodist, which for California atheists seems like an “evangelical, fundamentalist sect”, but out here in flyover country is really more of a social club where Jesus is sort of an honorary President.
(To be clear, I don’t want to lump Sullivan in with the “extremists”, but this quote is pretty representative of the sort of things being said about the VP in the situation by the “gay community” though a lot tamer than some.)

And mostly they all missed the important point – a baby is a blessing, an impending birth a joyous occasion. Congratulations are in order and though they’ll likely never read it:Congratulations Mary and Heather.